Project: A Citizen Observatory and Innovation Marketplace for Land Use and Land Cover Monitoring (LANDSENSE, H2020 689812)

Abstract

The Horizon 2020 project, LandSense, is building a modern citizen observatory for Land Use & Land Cover (LULC) monitoring, by connecting citizens with Earth Observation (EO) data to transform current approaches to environmental decision making. Citizen Observatories are community-driven mechanisms to complement existing environmental monitoring systems and can be fostered through EO-based mobile and web applications, allowing citizens to not only play a key role in LULC monitoring, but also to be directly involved in the co-creation of such solutions. A critical component within the project is the LandSense Engagement Platform, a service platform comprised of highly marketable EO-based solutions that contribute to the transfer, assessment, valuation, uptake and exploitation of LULC data and related results. The platform engages citizens to view, analyze and share data collected from different citizen science campaigns and create their own maps, individually and collaboratively. In addition, citizens can participate in ongoing demonstration pilots using their own devices (e.g. mobile phones and tablets), through interactive reporting and gaming applications, as well as launching their own campaigns. This interaction is achieved by bringing together and extending various key pieces of technology like Geo-Wiki, LACO-Wiki, Geopedia, SentinelHub and the Earth Observation Data Centre. Furthermore, a key pillar of the platform is the LandSense Federation which supports users to authenticate from a variety of login providers using social media (i.e. Facebook and Google) and some 2500 academic institutions globally (eduGAIN). Such a federated approach will promote the awareness, outreach, uptake and ultimately the science of citizen science. Services and solutions from the LandSense Engagement Platform are currrently deployed through a series of citizen science campaigns in Vienna, Toulouse, Amsterdam, Serbia, and Spain covering topics such as urban greenspaces, agricultural management and bird habitat/biodiversity monitoring. The presentation will not only showcase the results from these campaigns, but also highlight how one can link to the platform to exploit its EO services and launch your own citizen science campaigns.